Over the weekend I was chatting with a buddy about EM's constant PIPs even though things are going well. He told me that his old company used to pull that kind of cr-p - they'd kick people to the curb in advance to prepare for the bad times. But when you really think about it, that's just a recipe for disaster. You get rid of a bunch of folks, which screws with your operations, which then causes the downturn you were so worried about in the first place. And of course, the bigwigs in charge will be so proud for being so smart, even though they're the ones who caused the whole mess! It's like they're playing some messed up game where they always win and we always lose, no matter what.
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Agenda 2030
If assessments were fair, far more in BTC would be NSI than in western countries.
Quite often I catch BTC engineers making horribly dangerous decisions. When there are not enough experienced westerners to catch these mistakes, facilities will fail and people could die.
Very dangerous path EM has chosen.
Beyond the paycheck, it's intelligence and well versed people such as @bce+1lSyEc1j that compel me to continue working at XOM. He or she is the type of leader we need versus the leaches we have. Thank you for your insight Sir or Maam! I hope you're either close to retirement or find a better employer that respects your strategic view.
The game of being an American executive today would best be described as "Heads I win, tails you lose." Hire a lot more people? Bonus for your vision. Discover you over hired in the previous example and cut headcount to cut costs? Bonus for your financial discipline. Pay too much for an asset? Bonus for seeing the future and supposedly skating where the puck is going. Take a write down for paying too much for an asset? Change the bonus formula to exclude it and give yourself a bonus for fiscal responsibility.
No good answers for how to solve this, but in the last several decades, effectively the executive class went from being actual business (and community) leaders who created business and community value, to simply being parasites whose performance within their scope of responsibility in the business has little meaningful tie to their outsized compensation relative to history.
Today's large company executives simply focus on maximizing personal compensation, regardless of whether it's at the expense of the enterprise. This is usually done with extreme risk avoidance - you can't be penalized for nothing, but can always be penalized for failure. Most strangely, today's executives think of themselves as business people, when by most metrics, they don't actually create bottom line value. Unfortunately reality is that today's executives more closely resemble parasites that are just strip mining the business for their "cut" than businesspeople or leaders of days past.
Shhhh...you supposed to ignore the man behind the curtain